My name is James Gray and the “Career Strategy Framework” is a synthesis of my work experiences, MBA studies, and research to maximize life happiness and career impact. This topic is an intersection of my passions including strategy, marketing, management, and analytics. I developed the framework back in 2006 as I planned for a career transition and have refined it over the years as a manager at Microsoft. I was driven to architect a career planning process that was intentional, practical and took a holistic approach to not only my career but was integrated into other aspects of my life. There are many deep topics and theories on career planning and strategy but I never found an approach that pulled together all of the pieces to plan and execute a career. I found myself taking personal assessments and creating development plans in a disjointed manner. The 5 strategies represent a “framework” or model that can be used as a lens and process to create and refine your personal career strategy. Over the years I have called it a framework because it’s always under refinement and when I find new concepts from thought leaders I find what to plug into the career strategy model.
The aspiration of this website is to share the framework and best practices to help people maximize happiness and realize a fulfilling career. My hope is that it inspires curiosity about the life you live and optimizes fulfillment at the workplace and beyond. The framework does not guarantee success but it will take you on a journey to deeply learn about who you are, what you want in life, and how to get there. Many of the concepts are not new but the framework integrates five strategies into simple and intentional ways to approach your career lifecycle. I share my applied examples and the best practices from other thought leaders on this topic.
You can reference the Career Strategy Framework overview and the detailed content on the Know, Target, Roadmap, Develop, and Sell strategies. My blog posts are also categorized by these same topics and provide additional examples and ideas beyond the written content. Over the years I have learned more about myself and how to enrich the Career Strategy Framework through presentations and helping fellow colleagues apply this framework to their careers. I hope that you will share your best practices to inspire others to maximize happiness and career impact.
Over the last year, colleagues have suggested I write a book but after I thought about it more it was clear that most of the value comes from a community where we can learn from and inspire each other. My vision is a framework where others can contribute to, evolve, and apply it in a way that I have never imagined. I have integrated this website into the Facebook Platform to enable a sense of “community” and I hope that you will share your best practices to inspire others to maximize happiness and career impact. You can also follow this topic on Twitter and connect on the Facebook Page.
May each day bring you the happiness you aspire for.